I will be attending the September 2011 MN System Center User Group. They will be giving away 2 free copies of a TechNet subscription and a copy of my Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 book.

Paul Thomsen, Solution Engineer for 1E will be speaking and they will also have free food.

Visit the user groups website for more info: http://mnscug.org/meetings/173-september-2011-meeting.html

I recently ran across a thread on DPM TechNet forums with a topic on how to access DPM alerts.   They wanted to monitor DPM errors and events. You can use a third party tool to do this or you can use System Center Operations Manager/Essentials .

If you have the option to use System Center to monitor your DPM I recommend this as it does work pretty well. In my environment I  use System Center Essentials 2010 to monitor DPM alerts. The first step to monitoring your DPM server is to make sure you publish the DPM alerts to the Windows Event Viewer. To do this follow these steps:

1. Go to the DPM Administrator console
2. Click on “Action” on the top bar in DPM
3. Select “Options”
4. Click the “Alert Publishing” tab
5. Click the “Publish Active Alerts” button
6. Click ok

This will send your DPM alerts to the Windows Event viewer on your server and either SCOM/SCE can access them from there or a third party systems monitoring tool. You will find the alerts in Windows Event viewer under “Applications and Service Logs”. You will see “DPM Alerts” and “DPM backup Events” (Note: if you want backup alerts you need to publish them as well) listed here.

Here are links to error codes and the DPM  troubleshooting guides:

• DPM 2007 Error Code Catalog: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb795681.aspx
• DPM 2007 TS Guide: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb963868.aspx
• DPM 2010 Error Code Catalog: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff399290.aspx
• DPM 2010 TS Guide: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff399248.aspx

Here is a link to a good article by David Allen (System Center MVP) on

“Monitoring DPM using SCOM”  http://www.scdpmonline.org/monitoring-dpm-using-opsmgr-cookdown-powershell.aspx

I ran across a tool Microsoft has for testing remote OCS and Lync connectivity from outside your firewall:

Here is the URL: https://www.testocsconnectivity.com/

I posted about a similar Exchange testing tool a while back HERE!.

Data Protection Manager 2012 Beta is Now Available!

You can download it here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=897a604a-cace-42b9-944d-4c690917f989

For more information about DPM 2012 visit:

• http://blogs.technet.com/b/dpm/archive/2011/09/01/system-center-data-protection-manager-2012-beta-now-available.aspx

and

• Whats new in DPM 2012 Screencast by DPM MVP Mike Resseler

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/edge/Video/hh285690

~ How to Configure System Center Essentials 2010 ~

We already covered How to install System Center Essentials 2010 (SCE2010) in part  1:

http://www.buchatech.com/2010/09/install-and-configure-system-center-essentials-2010-part-1.

It has been a while as I had to find the time to draft this post. In part 2 we will cover basic configuration of SCE2010. As you already know SCE2010 is a combination of several System Center products so there are a fair amount of settings that need to be configured. When you first open up SCE2010 a wizard opens that you use to configure it. Here is the list of what is in the initial configuration:

• Group Policy Settings (Use Local or Domain Group Policy)
• Computer Discovery (A scheduled job that adds new computers to SCE2010.)
• Email Notifications (What email server and account is used to send out notifications.)
• Proxy Server
• Monitoring Configuration
• Error Monitoring and Forwarding

and

• Microsoft Updates (Update Languages, Update Classifications, and Update Deployment)

Here is a screenshot of the initial configuration wizard.

In this post we will basically go through the options in the wizard and some other basic settings you may want to configure.

Read the rest of this entry »

In SCE 2010 you put in a set of Active Directory account credentials when you first install. This account is used by default when installing SCE 2010 agents on computers and when SCE 2010 scans Active Directory for newly added computers. Sometimes the wrong account is used for your “Run As” account when SCE 2010 is setup and needs to be changed to a different account later.

Here is how you can do this:

• Open the SCE 2010 console
• Click on Administration
• Expand Security and then select Run As Accounts

• In the right hand pane Right click on the top account in the list. It will have a description of “This is the user account under which all rules run by default on the agent.“
• Select Properties

You will be able to change the user account and password. Now when your SCE scans for computers on the network and you install agents it will use the Active Directory account you changed the Run As account to.

dBeamer!DPM is a third party tool that is added to your DPM to extend its functionality. dBeamer!DPM was made by a company called Instavia Software Inc. Instavia creates virtualization and availability tools. dBeamer!DPM can be used to add your DPM as a part of your High Availability (HA) infrastructure by increasing your RTO to near 0. dBeamer!DPM allows you to recover data even if your DPM services or DPM database is down and gives you the ability for the data to be used the minute it starts being restored.

We are going to take a look at dBeamer!DPM its capabilities and how to get this working with DPM. We are also going to test accessing a Hyper-V virtual machine while the virtual machine is being restored from DPM using dBeamer!DPM.

AT A GLANCE:

• Overview of dBeamer
  • Overview of the technology behind dBeamer, what it does and how it works.
• Overview of dBeamer!DPM.
• Deployment of dBeamer!DPM
  • dBeamer!DPM install on DPM Server.
  • dBeamer install on a Protected Server.

• Real world dBeamer!DPM test
  • Test recovery of Hyper-V virtual machine and use while it is running.

Overview of dBeamer

dBeamer is the technology underneath dBeamer!DPM. dBeamer uses an operation called BEAM that allows you to copy data such as files, folders, virtual machines and database to a different location and this data is made available instantly. Another example is that you could start a BEAM of a video and begin playing it while it is still copying over. So for example a user could start reading or modifying Microsoft Word documents or a live database while the data is still being copied. dBeamer BEAM technology works regardless of the size of data that you are copying.

dBeamer has a pause and resume operation to head of loss of data during a BEAM. For example if data is being beamed over a network and network connectivity is lost dBeamer will pause and then resume when connectivity is restored. dBeamer is integrated right into Microsoft windows through a windows explorer extension. dBeamer also has a scripting and command line tool so that you can automate the initiation of a BEAM operation.

You can start the dBeamer BEAM operation one of three ways:

1. Beaming right from Windows Explorer

2. Beaming from command shell

3. Using the dBeamer application itself

dBeamer runs on NTFS and requires 4GB RAM minimum to run. dBeamer uses a large amount of RAM to perform the BEAM operations and that is why there is a requirement of at least 4GB of ram. The more RAM that is allocated on machines that are beaming the better performance you will get. dBeamer is supported on these following operating systems:

· Windows 2003 with SP2 (x86 and x64)

· Windows 2003 R2 with SP2 (x86 and x64)

· Windows 2008 with SP2 (x86 and x64)

· Windows 2008 R2 (x64)

· Windows 7 (x86 and x64)

Enough about dBeamer itself let’s look at how this technology actually works. This is what happens when dBeamer performs a BEAM operation:

Step 1: A BEAM is initiated to copy data from one location to another.

Step 2: dBeamer creates a virtual local file view of the data that is being beamed on the destination.

Step 3: Once the virtual local file is completely created in the destination it can immediately be used.

Step 4: On the destination when portions of the data that is being Beamed is needed dBeamer then fetches the needed data blocks on demand allowing for continues access of data that has not even been transferred yet.

Step 5: dBeamer continues to simultaneously copy the data content in a sequential fashion without overwriting the modified contents of the virtual local file, once the BEAM is complete dBeamer stops and the data in the destination is completely beamed over as a whole.

Read the rest of this entry »

For you devs out there, A colleague of mine Luke Grindahl recently published a white paper about the pro/cons of the different deployment methods when deploying from Team Foundation Server 2010 to SharePoint. You can download the whitepaper here: http://www.repliweb.com/resources/lp/tfs2010_shp_whitepaper.php

I have seen issues on DPM forums where others have recovered from DPM failures and their protected data becomes inactive or other issues such as the data suddenly becoming inactive on its own placing the data in a category named “Inactive protection for previously protected data”. It is not clear how to mark protected data active again once it is marked as inactive. In this post we are first going to look at the manual process of marking protected data inactive and then bringing it back into an active state.

Marking Protected Data as Inactive in DPM:

• Go into DPM Administrator console.
• Go to the Protection area.
• Right click on the Protected Data and select Stop Protection.
• When the Remove From Group window appears be sure that the checkbox next to "Delete replica on disk" is unchecked.

If this is checked the data will not simply be marked inactive but will delete the data.

• Click OK.

Your data will now appear in an Inactive state.

New replicas of this data will no longer be created but the existing replicas will remain on the DPM server for future recover.

Marking Protected Data from Inactive back to Active in DPM:

Marking the protected data from inactive back to active is not as simple as right clicking on and selecting an option.

That would be a logical place for that option to be but it is not. To mark the data active again you need to modify the protection group the data belonged to and add it back in.

This will mark the data active to start protecting it again. Your existing replicas will be present and you can restore from them.

Here are the steps to do this:

• Go into DPM Administrator console.
• Go to the Protection area.
• Right click on the Protection Group that your inactive data was a part of and chose Modify Protection Group.
• Locate the protected data that is inactive & select it for protection then complete the modify protection group wizard.

You will see the following warning:

• Click yes on this warning as it is letting you know that the inactive data will start a consistency check as soon as it becomes active.

Once it is successful your protected data will now be back in an active state.

We all know that DPM can protect basic Windows Servers 2003 through 2008 R2 including files, folders, and critical server components like system state and do BMR’s of servers. DPM can also protect Windows application specific workloads. I often see confusion or questions in forums about the applications that can be protected natively by DPM. In this post I will set out to list the applications DPM protects natively and list resources to other common applications and where to get the information on properly backing them up.

Read the rest of this entry »